Xbox 360 dashboard update now available

11 August 2009

By Miktar

It doesn’t include the much-coveted Twitter and Facebook integrations, but the new Dashboard Update for Xbox 360 does have a long list of pretty useful feature upgrades and bug-fixes, all of which are detailed in this sexy list right here.

Not interested in reading that much? Here are the highlights:

Games On Demand: You can now buy new games via Xbox Live directly, if you’re willing to download that much. The benefits to this are not having to get off the couch to go buy a game, and you can play the game without putting a disc in the drive. It’s the ultimate gaming experience if you’re rich, uncapped and lazy.

Avatar Bling: Now you can buy clothing and props for your avatar, spending real money on fake threads and little Halo Warthog buggies that drive around you.

Parties: The Party system (do you even use this?) has been improved, invites are easier to send out and if someone drops out of the party having been disconnected, they will automatically rejoin once online again.

Gold Member Veteran Show-offing: If you’ve been an Xbox Live Gold member for a long time (don’t ask us how long that is, Microsoft ain’t telling), you now get a little flare on your Gamertag to show it. Yay!

Video Display Stuff: There are some new settings in the Display menu, namely Display Discovery, which are there to assist you in playing your game at the best resolution possible, if you’re on HDMI.

User Ratings: Now you can rate (out of five stars) any bit of game content on the Marketplace, and sort Marketplace listings by rating. Buy what everyone else thinks is good!

UI Improvements: Xbox Live Community Games is now Xbox Live Indie Games (just what we always wanted), you can now launch games straight from the Achievement Browser, and there is a new browser for checking your Achievements in-game.

The Best Of All: Voice Messages will now alert you if you’re about to send a voice message that has nothing but silence in it because you forgot to switch on your microphone. Oh, and you can sort your Friends List.

So there you have it. We’re not sure how big this update is (ours is still busy downloading), but we’ll add to this post the instant we know how much the Dashboard Update will eat out of your available bandwidth you wanted to use for more Naruto episodes. You kids and your Pokemon.

UPDATE: According to some of the readers on the IRC channel, the update is around 60-70MB.

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